


Legacy

by Transposable_Element



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2019-07-13 15:30:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16020782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transposable_Element/pseuds/Transposable_Element
Summary: A crow brings Susan her legacy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is not finished, but it was about to disappear unless I posted it.
> 
> Note that it is not part of my series "Life After Narnia," although it does have some details in common.

After the train accident Susan had a lot to do because there was nobody else left to tidy up her family’s belongings and settle their estates except Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold, who had never been much use in a crisis.

Besides, Susan needed something to keep her going lest she fall apart altogether.

When she was worn out from responding to letters of condolence, and from sorting through all of her parents' belongings (and Peter's, and Edmund's, and Lucy's, not to mention Professor Kirke's, because it turned out that he had bequeathed what was left of his mismanaged fortune to Peter); and from talking to solicitors and bankers and Inland Revenue bureaucrats, all wearing drab grey suits and somber expressions; and from placating librarians from Cambridge University, King's College London, and the British Museum, all of whom were eager to get their hands on the professor's papers; and from deflecting offers of consolation from various men—including several of her brothers’ friends, a colleague of Uncle Harold’s, and, most distressingly, two old friends of her father’s, both of them married—then she had to do something simple and mindless to keep the weight of her grief from crushing her; and the thing she found herself doing more and more often was feeding birds in the back garden of her parents' house in Finchley.

There were always sparrows and pigeons and starlings. Sometimes there would be a blue tit or a robin or a blackbird. And one day there was a big black crow that looked at her with undeniable intelligence and hung about after it had eaten its fill, almost as though it were trying to keep her company. When it flew away she felt strangely bereft.

But soon the crow returned (at least, she imagined it was the same crow), carrying in its claws a small, battered wooden box, which it dropped at her feet. The box was covered with what once must have been intricate carvings, but it was so badly scratched and so encrusted with dirt that Susan couldn’t make out any details.

When she pried the box open she found that it contained six rings, three green and three yellow.

Susan stared at the rings, fascinated. They were smooth and shiny, and she wondered what they were made of. They didn’t look like any metal she had ever seen. Porcelin, perhaps? Enamel? Glass? Some sort of polished gemstone? Bakelite? Whatever they were made of, they were brighter than bright, amazingly so, especially given how dirty and battered the box was.

Looking at the rings made Susan feel queer, and she fancied she heard a faint ringing in her ears. It almost seemed to her as if the sound was coming from the rings.

“Why did you bring these to me?” she asked. But the crow merely regarded her, its head cocked. Susan shook her head ruefully. What did she expect the crow to do? Talk back?

She looked again at the rings. She felt a great desire to touch them—they were so perfect, so beautifully shiny! But somewhere in her mind was a crumb of a memory. Somebody had once described rings like these to her. They were dangerous and must be handled carefully, if at all.

With great effort, she closed the box. As soon as she did so her head felt clearer, and the ringing in her ears stopped. She weighed the box thoughtfully in her hand, trying to remember when and how and from whom she had heard of rings like these before. They couldn’t really be dangerous, of course, unless they were stolen goods or something like that. But now that the box was closed and she had no more desire to touch the rings, she felt better.

The crow launched itself into the air, but it didn’t fly away. Instead it flapped up into the branches of a tree next to the house and lit on a branch just outside one of the attic windows.

“ _Kraa_ ,  _kraa_ ,” it called.

Susan put the box in her pocket and went inside. She climbed the stairs to the attic, which was full of crates and trunks and boxes that she hadn’t sorted through yet. She had packed up her siblings’ things, and the contents of the professor’s tiny furnished flat, and had them shipped to her parents’ house. Her siblings had owned very little, so most of what was in the attic belonged to her parents and Professor Kirke. Just looking at it all made her feel bone weary.

The crow was still sitting on the tree branch, and without quite understanding why she was doing it, Susan opened the window and gestured, inviting it in. The crow bobbed its head once and flapped inside. It began hopping around the attic as though looking for something. Susan watched it for a moment, and then decided that as long as she was up here she might as well start sorting through some of the boxes.

Susan knelt down and opened a crate. It proved to contain a hodgepodge of old volumes, some of them in Latin or Greek, along with newer, cheap books with paper covers. The Professor’s tastes had certainly been eclectic. She began sorting, picking out fiction in modern languages to donate to the Red Cross and putting the rest back in the crate, which would eventually go to an antiquarian bookseller in Charing Cross Road. Susan was nearly finished with the crate when she was startled by a loud caw. It was the crow, which she had almost forgotten about, and it was perched on an old trunk of the professor’s that she hadn’t even looked at yet. “Do you want me to open that?” she asked. The crow bobbed its head and hopped down to the floor.

_This is ridiculous, taking orders from a crow_ , Susan thought, as she knelt down next to the trunk and opened it.

The trunk was full of notebooks and papers. Some of them were very old indeed, dating all the way back to the turn of the century. These were a glimpse into the Professor’s childhood. Susan decided to take some of the notebooks downstairs to read, as the dust was beginning to make her nose itch and her eyes water. The crow bobbed its head and hopped over to the windowsill. With a caw, it launched into the air and flew away over the rooftops. Susan closed the window, wondering if it would come back, and if so, how she would recognize it. One crow looks very like another.

Susan gathered up an armful of the old notebooks. Downstairs, she made herself a cup of tea, and then she sat down to read, beginning with the oldest. It was a sort of a journal, written during the spring of 1900, when Digory Kirke was 12 years old and miserable. It was very sad reading, because a lot of it was about his mother, who was dying—of cancer, it sounded like. Susan was puzzled by this, because she remembered Professor Kirke once telling her about his mother nursing him through influenza after he came back from the Great War. But perhaps it had been a stepmother who had nursed him?

Susan read on. Digory’s father was in India, and Digory was living in London, which he hated, with his aunt and uncle. The aunt seemed to be kindly, but a bit stiff and old-fashioned. The uncle sounded awful: his behavior was very odd, and Digory worried that he was mad. Then, at the beginning of the summer, Digory met his next door neighbor, Polly Plummer, and began to be a little more cheerful. He still wrote about his fears for his mother, but he also wrote about Polly and their growing friendship. This clearly lifted Digory’s spirits, and Susan, who had never got on with Miss Plummer, felt wistful affection for young Polly.

The journal entries continued almost daily, telling of games and plans. And then late in July there was a gap, during which Digory didn’t write for more than a week. Susan feared that his mother had died, but the next entry began,  _I have not written since we came back because I have been a little afraid that I have only been dreaming, but this morning Mother was so well that I know it is all true. Mother is getting better! All the adults are very puzzled. The doctor keeps shaking his head in a pleased sort of way and saying he’s never seen anything like it. Aunt Letty still warns me not to get my hopes up and says this may just be a temporary improvement, but I am certain that Aslan has kept his promise._

Susan hastily closed the notebook. Her heart was thumping, her stomach roiling.

_Aslan._

The memories Susan had tried to banish, memories she had told herself were dreams or fairy-tales, strained against the barriers she had built. Squeezing her eyes shut, she dropped the notebook and put her hands over her ears.  _Get away! Leave me alone!_  Still the images came: the Lion, the wild rivers and forests and seas of Narnia, the people she had known there: Tumnus, Lilygloves, Trumpkin, that old Centaur, what was his name? Her young friend Corin, and— _No no no, don’t think of that_ —Peter the Magnificent, Edmund the Just, and Lucy the Valiant. The feel of a bow and arrow in her hands. She gritted her teeth, calling up images of pavements, cloudy skies, soot-blackened buildings, rubble. She drowned out the lilting flutes and spritely drums with the lumbering bombast of “Rule Britannia.”

Finally Susan managed to push the memories back where they belonged. She took a deep breath and imagined locking a door in her mind and drawing a bolt for good measure.

The notebook had slid from her lap to the floor. Susan picked it up and put it back in the stack with the other notebooks and papers, and then she took the stack up to the attic and put it back in the trunk. She took the box with the rings out of her pocket and put that in the trunk as well.

Susan went back downstairs, made herself a fresh cup of tea, and rang up her friend Molly, who had been badgering her to get out more instead of sitting at home alone.

“Of course I’d love to see you!” said Molly. “Do you want to go to the pictures?  _The Third Man_ is still showing at the Gaumont.”

“Perfect,” said Susan. For some reason, Orson Welles struck her as being exactly what she needed.


	2. Chapter 2

For the next week Susan worked doggedly at organizing and sorting the professor’s books, pushing aside any stray thoughts about the old notebooks or the rings.

Then one morning she had a panicked telephone call from Aunt Alberta, who seemed to have come completely unhinged. She was babbling about how Eustace was missing, and of course she had rung Experiment House, but they told her a whole pack of lies about a train crash, and Susan must know where Eustace was, and why was she keeping him from his own mother? Susan didn’t think she was the best person to cope with this, so she rang Uncle Harold’s office, but he wasn’t there and his secretary would only say that he had gone out and she didn’t know when he would be back. Susan had suspected for some time that her uncle was having an affair, and now she was certain of it.

Finally, cursing both Harold and Alberta, she took the train up to Cambridge. She found Aunt Alberta sitting in her living room with the shades drawn, wearing a raincoat, carpet slippers, and sunglasses. Susan soon discovered that underneath the raincoat Alberta wore nothing but a tweed skirt and a brassiere. Alberta was convinced that Eustace had been kidnapped, and she began spinning a garbled narrative of government agents and international conspiracies. She kept calling Susan “Helen,” which wasn’t too surprising as it was a mistake she had sometimes made even before the accident; Susan resembled her mother, and she must remind Alberta of the way Helen had looked when they were young. But now Alberta really seemed to believe that she was talking to her sister, not her niece.

Susan decided not to correct her aunt or to try to explain to her what had happened to Eustace. It seemed needlessly cruel, and she doubted Alberta would understand or believe her, anyway. She might even decide that Susan was part of the conspiracy. Instead she played along with the whole charade, listening to her aunt ramble, patting her hand, encouraging her to eat. Eventually Alberta agreed that she might as well have a lie-down. Susan promised not to open the door to anybody except Harold.

Uncle Harold came home at six o’clock. Despite her aunt and uncle’s much-vaunted teetotaling, Susan could smell whiskey on his breath, which he had tried to cover up with peppermint. Susan dragged him into the kitchen and gave him a lecture about taking better care of his wife. To her horror he fell apart and confessed the affair (including several details that Susan  _really_  would rather not have known about). He said that before the accident he and Alberta had been on the point of separating, and now he felt that Eustace’s death had trapped him in the marriage. Susan was disgusted.

In the end Susan rang Alberta’s friend Poppy, who had struck her has rather more level-headed than most of her aunt’s circle. Poppy, at least, had sympathy for Susan: “You poor dear. With everything you have to bear right now! I’ll take it from here,” she said. She offered to start looking into possibilities for caring for Alberta—a rest home, perhaps. Susan was so relieved to have someone take one of her burdens from her shoulders that she burst into tears. She stayed overnight with Poppy and her husband and took the train back to London in the morning.

By the time Susan got home from Cambridge she had decided that she was through with Uncle Harold once and for all. She felt some responsibility for Aunt Alberta, but knew that she was not the best person to take care of her aunt. Others could do it better. The last of her family ties were withering away.

Susan ran a bath, as hot as the ailing water heater could make it, but when she got into the tub it was barely blood warm. She was near despair. What was it all for, after all? To go on living, day after day? What was the point? For a moment she thought she ought to just slip into the bath and end it all, but when her thoughts turned in this direction she had a vivid memory of a deep voice saying “Susan…You have listened to your fears, child.”

Who had said that to her? The voice seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place it. It didn’t sound like something her father would say, and Peter wouldn’t have called her “child.” The professor, perhaps? No, that was wrong, too. In any case, the fleeting impulse passed.

She needed a holiday, but she knew it would have to wait. She had no money, not until her parents’ estate had finished going through probate. She was sure that the sale of the professor’s books would barely serve to cover his debts, and her siblings had left little in the way of savings. At least she had a house that nobody could turn her out of. She got out of the bath, dried herself, made a cup of tea. She sat at the table, drinking her tea and mechanically eating a stale biscuit. Then she fetched the bag of birdseed from the cupboard and went into the back garden.

The crow was there again. Susan didn’t know why, but she was certain it was the same crow. She threw down some seed, but the crow ignored it, and several sparrows made short work of it. The crow hopped toward her, cocking its head and clacking its beak. She fancied it looked impatient.

“You want me to read that journal, don’t you?” she asked. The crow bobbed its head.

 

 

Susan kept throwing out seed as a matter of principle, but the crow didn’t take any, leaving it to the sparrows. Eventually the bag was finished. She went inside, started to make herself another cup of tea, and then put down the kettle and said aloud, “No more shilly-shallying! Time to face the music!” She climbed the stairs to the attic and, pushing aside some crates that she had stacked up next to it, she went over to the trunk. She flipped up the lid, stifled a sneeze, and pulled out the notebooks and, after a moment’s hesitation, the box containing the rings. Down the stairs to the kitchen she went. She thumped the stack of notebooks on the table. She brushed the cover of the top notebook, the one she had already started reading, with her hand, then pressed down hard with her palm as though to pin it to the table.

_What are you so afraid of? It’s just some old notebooks!_

But she knew. Even now, the memories were pushing against the door in her mind.


	3. Chapter 3

There was nothing for it. Susan sat down at the kitchen table and opened the first notebook, finding the place where she had stopped before.

At first she couldn’t follow what Professor Kirke (or Digory) had written, but after a bewildering ten minutes or so she realized that he had recorded the story over a period of several months, writing nearly every day, but had not written it in sequential order. Possibly this was because, as he observed at one point, some parts of the story were easier for him to write about than others. In any event, he had later gone back and numbered the entries so that it was possible to read them in chronological order, and he had put in page numbers to make the next section easier to find. He also appeared to have done some editing over the next few years, perhaps adding details or observations as they came to him. There were a number of loose leaves tucked into the notebook, covered with Polly Plummer's writing, and a few notes in her handwriting next to Digory’s entries, as well.

Susan had the sense that Digory Kirke had worked very hard to tell the whole truth, in all its complexity. It was all so characteristic of the scholar he would become that Susan felt a pang, remembering the deep affection she had once felt for the professor, which had somehow, over the years, faded into a distant cordiality. What had happened?

Once she got going she was soon engrossed. Even at the age of 12, Digory Kirke had been a clear and perceptive writer. His descriptions of his uncle, the rings, the Wood Between the Worlds, Charn, Jadis, the chaos of London, the birth of Narnia, the cabbie who became a king, the flying horse, the garden where the apples grew, and his own feelings: all were described in vivid detail. 

The parts that were further removed from Susan’s experience were easy for her to read. But when Digory described Narnia, its geography, and its inhabitants, her own memories dragged her out of the narrative again and again. When he wrote of the talking animals she remembered her own old friends—Sallowpad, and Lilygloves, and the dear Beavers. The descriptions of Fauns, Centaurs, Nymphs, and Dwarfs brought to mind other friends: Tumnus, of course; the Centaurs Tarnbow and Arrowleaf, and later Glenstorm; Dryads with names like the rustle of leaves; Naiads with names like rushing water; and Trumpkin, who in a very short time had become an stalwart friend.

And then she recalled something she hadn’t thought of in years:  _Those men were going to drown him_ , she remembered.  _I saved his life. I did that. Me._

She began to remember who she had been.

And then, of course, there was Aslan. Digory Kirke was reticent in his descriptions of the Lion, and yet the awe Susan remembered feeling was evident.

It wasn’t that she had forgotten Narnia: she hadn’t allowed herself to remember it.

Her memories were muddled and confused, a jumble of images and sounds, connected to each other by fragile threads. When she tried to think chronologically, to go through events one after another, more details emerged, but others remained elusive.

As the memories returned, so too came the consciousness of what the railway accident had taken from her. Susan began to comprehend that she had been in shock. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel the loss; to think about her family as really and truly gone _._ Now the numbness was dissolving.

The trouble with reclaiming her memories was that it also meant facing her grief.

She closed the notebook, carefully marking her place, and went upstairs to her parents’ bedroom. There, she lay down on the bed and wrapped herself in an old warm woolen coverlet crocheted by her long-dead grandmother. It smelt of lavender and, very faintly, of lanolin.

Susan had wept before, many times, since the accident. She did not weep now. She lay on the bed and closed her eyes and allowed herself to feel the abyss, the endless emptiness where her family had been.

She was grateful for her memories, as painful as some of them were. They were all she had left.

 

It was a long time before Susan got up, and when she did she found that it was dark; the clock said it was near midnight. She had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and she was famished. It was the first time since the accident that she had felt real hunger, not just physical hunger, but a desire to eat, a craving for something hot and satisfying. There was very little food in the kitchen, but she did have the ingredients for a dinner of buttered eggs, toast, jam, and tea. When she was finished, she was still hungry, so she cooked and ate the same dinner once more.

Then she went to bed and fell into an exhausted sleep. 

 

Over the next few days Susan did very little but wander around the house, doing a few small chores and returning to the kitchen table periodically to read the notebooks, which contained not just Digory Kirke's story of the rings and his trip to Narnia, but speculation about the nature and structure of the universe and its many worlds, as well as summaries of conversations he had had with Polly Plummer about these topics.

The entries continued fairly regularly until 1914, when Digory Kirke went to war. After he came home, they were very sporadic. These must be his Narnia notebooks, Susan realized, because surely other things had been going on for him to write about during those years. And, as she thought, an entry from 1928 was followed by one dated 1940. It was about the Wardrobe, of course, and her own family.

Susan had feared that reading what the professor had to say about her and her own experiences in Narnia would be painful to read, but she found that it wasn't. Something in her mind had opened or released, and she found herself eager to read what the professor had written about her and her siblings.

Again, the notebooks contained not just the stories of their time in Narnia, but speculations and notes of conversations with Susan and Lucy and Peter and Edmund, and, later on, with their cousin Eustace and with Jill Pole, as well as continuing discussions with Polly Plummer. 

A few years ago, after the war ended, the whole group had taken to meeting every once in a while. Susan had been invited, but she had not gone. 

It was during breakfast one morning, while reading the description of one of these meetings, that Susan realized that she needed somebody to talk to. She could think of only one somebody. 


	4. Chapter 4

Susan went out to the back garden, taking her mug of tea and the box of rings. She was not surprised to find a crow standing on an overturned flowerpot next to the stairs leading down into the garden.

It looked like every crow she had ever seen.

“Are you the crow who brought me this?” she asked, holding out the box.

The crow bobbed its head.

“Does that mean yes?”

The crow bobbed its head again.

“And can you understand everything I say?”

Bob.

So far, so good, but this conversation wouldn’t go very far if the crow could only answer yes. Susan sat down on the stair, sipped her tea, and thought a moment before asking, “Would you show me how you answer no?”

The crow clacked its beak.

“Does that mean no?”

Bob.

Susan decided this was clear enough.

“Are you a Narnian crow?”

Clack.

Susan felt a moment’s disappointment, but continued. “Do you know about Narnia?”

Bob.

“Do you know Aslan?”

Bob. Clack.

Oh dear! Susan took another sip of tea while she pondered this answer. “Does that mean yes and no?”

Bob.

“Do you know him, but by another name?”

Bob.

“Are you… from this world?”

Clack.

“In the world you came from, could you talk?”

Bob.

“But not here? I mean, can you talk here?”

Clack.

“That must be frustrating.”

Bob. Bob. Bob.

“If we were in Narnia, could you talk there?”

The crow was still for a moment, then flapped its left wing.

Susan thought again. How many ways were there to answer a yes or no question? "Does that mean maybe?"

Clack.

“Does it mean ‘I don’t know?"

Bob.

"So, your left wing ... wait, do you know left from right?"  
  
The bird bobbed, rather curtly, Susan thought. 

"All right, the left wing means I don't know, and can you do the right wing for maybe?"

Bob.

Susan hoped that they now had all the possible answers to yes or no questions covered.

“Are these rings, the rings in this box, are they the same ones that Digory Kirke used to travel to Narnia?”

Bob.

“How did you get them?”

The crow cocked its head in what Susan took to be an expression of reproach. “Sorry, I forgot. Yes and no questions only!”

Bob.

“Are you… Are there any other crows here that come from your world?”

Bob.

“Have I met them?”

Bob.

“Some of the other crows here are intelligent, like you?”

Bob. Clack.

Yes and no. “So, they’re intelligent, but not like you?”

Bob.

“But they're from your world?”

Bob.

“Can they talk?”

Bob.

Susan gave a huff of laughter. “So, they’re intelligent, but not as clever as you?”

Bob.

“Well, that’s conceited!”

Bob.

Susan huffed again.

“How may crows are—no, wait. Are there more than two of you?”

Clack.

“So it’s just you and one other crow?”

Bob.

A pair of crows. Susan wondered if they were mates, but decided that question could wait.

“Do you want to go back to your world?”

Bob. Clack.

“Do you want to go back to your world eventually, but not right away?”

Bob.

“Do you want me to go with you, to your world?”

Bob.

Susan was pleased. The crow wanted her company. She was flattered, and for some reason, in contrast to all the doubts and confusions of the past few months, she felt quite certain that traveling with the crow was the right thing to do.

“And could we go other places, other worlds like Narnia?”

Bob. Clack.

“Could we go to Narnia, but not other worlds?”

Clack.

“Oh. So… could we go to other worlds, but not Narnia?”

Bob.

Susan sighed. Of course. She couldn’t go back. Aslan had said so. Still, she had hoped…

“Are you in a hurry to go?”

Bob. Clack.

“Are you in a _great_ hurry to go?”

Clack.

“Would a fortnight be soon enough?”

Bob.

“I need time to get ready, you see,” she said. “I might not come back, and I don’t want to leave too much unfinished business here. And I need to get a few things…”

The crow cocked its head and waited. It occurred to Susan that she didn’t know whether it was male or female. Well, she could ask later.

Susan sat on the stair for a few minutes, drinking her tea and thinking. She was making a list in her head: Rucksack, knife, fire striker, sturdy clothes, boots. Maybe some of Ed’s old clothes would fit well enough, and there was some camping equipment up in the attic that she hadn’t gone through yet. Her bow and arrow, which she hadn’t touched in a couple of years, were up there, too. Ought she to cut her hair?

The crow was waiting.

“I need to do some thinking before we make plans. Could you be here again tomorrow morning, around the same time? You and your friend?”

Bob.

“Tomorrow, then,” she said.

The crow bobbed once more, and then it took to the air.


End file.
